ABSTRACT

Miss A, the shy waitress encountered in Chapter 1, could not tell her story. Her inner life of feelings, ideas, imaginings, memories and so forth was experienced as having value. To speak of these things was a risk. The wrong response from others would cause their value to be lost. That which she sensed as the core of herself would be diminished or worse. The danger was that devaluation would af¯ict upon her a feeling of hurt and damage akin, in its pain, to physical harm.1